The purpose of this workshop is to provide teachers with the information and resources they need to help their students to "make strategic use of digital media and visual displays of data to express information and enhance understandingof presentations." (Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts)
Portfolio
Try making some kind of useful-to-you presentation using some new-to-you tools/understandings. You could take old teaching materials and add to them to accommodate more learners or you could make a new way of presenting information. Presentations are not always situations where the presenter stands at the front of a group--when creating materials for e-learning, one has to think of how the information will be presented.
Scaffolds
Look here (Getting Started) for strategies that will help you to try out new technology and programs.
Workshop Structure
This workshop includes information about strategic use of media followed by tables that summarize specific uses and provide resources. Along with providing information about media use, this workshop also demonstrates various kinds of media designed to make information available to as many people as possible.
Principles Behind the Strategic Use of Media
The purpose of using digital media is to enhance presentations through enriching the audience members' experiences with the information being presented. Strategic use of digital media means that presenters have thought through not just the ideas they want to share but also the ways in which they can share the ideas so that the audience will comprehend what they are presenting. This section considers how various forms of digital media work in terms of communicating ideas.
Media and Cognitive Processing
We take information in through our senses and then this information gets sorted out by the brain and sent to the correct part of the brain for comprehension related to each sense.
There are several factors that can influence how sensory information can get sorted and perceived:
If the person doesn't have the schemas for understanding something, their perceptions will not be detailed. For example, a sighted person using touch for reading Braille will feel the raised dots but probably won't perceive the various patterns of dots that differentiate each letter. A person new to reading music will see sheet music as a collection of confusing symbols while an advanced music reader will get a lot of information from the very same sheet of music (e.g., speed of the piece, pitches, rhythms, etc.). While everyone has a different set of schemas, one strategic use of media is to provide access to background information that a person can access independently and which does not have to be presented if the majority of people possess the necessary schemas.
Some people have perfect senses but their brains process information in ways that impede comprehension; often one or more "channels" (e.g., visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) will be significantly affected. This can be true for individuals with dyslexia and autism. If information is presented using multiple channels, then these people are more likely to understand it.
Some people may struggle with understanding linguistic information (reading, hearing speech, etc.) because they are not native speakers of that language. Presentations and information based solely in language will not reach new speakers of English. Fortunately, there are nonlinguistic alternatives or add-ons that can enhance the information for everyone.
Some people may have a mild to severe sensory loss. This means that their brains are not even getting the signals in one or more areas to process. Using multiple channels of information is critical in this situation. Fortunately, this is not even difficult with digital media. For example, the "widget" at the top of this page will turn text into speech so that information here can be seen but also heard. The use of the system of headings not only creates a nice table of contents for sighted viewers, but it also helps those who use web browsers for the visually impaired understand how information is organized.
Because of the potential perceptual and comprehension issues, presenters can maximize comprehension through using more than one sensory channel--such as auditory language but also images or actual artifacts that can be touched and experienced. Digital media, of course, opens up a great number of choices for presenting information across sensory channels.
Genres of Media and Their Characteristics
In literature there are many genres and each genre has a different purpose, a fact which we all know. It's difficult to write up a scientific experiment using poetry as the genre! The same is true with any kind of media. Each genre offers a different way of providing information and the selection of genre is a critical part of the strategic use of media. In the following section, each genre will be analyzed in relation to how it presents information.
Random and Serial Access
Imagine trying to describe this piece of land. From this aerial view we can see many of its features--the river, fields, trees, and houses. We can see each element of the land and its relationship to the other elements, such as the river bend and the vegetation in that bend. We see all the features equally--the photographer has placed the river in the middle, suggesting that it is the main subject of the photo, but other things can be seen equally well.
If you were on the ground and you had to help someone else understand the features and elements of the land without benefit of a helicopter, how would you do it? Where would you go? What part should be described first? What part should be last? How would you use words to describe the relationship of the fields to the river? How would you describe the river bends and their locations? In other words, how could you help the person develop similar schemas to the person who flew over the land and took this picture?
The aerial view is "randomly accessible" information--your eyes can look anywhere in order to find information. The walk on the ground is "serially accessible" information--which means in order to understand the whole thing, you have to go through information that requires time and memory. Another example of this is the difference between Google maps and Google street view. In fact, internet mapping services such as Mapquest and Google maps offer information in both random and serial access formats. If you drive somewhere unfamiliar, you can print out the map or you can print out the step-by-step instructions. A GPS unit will offer verbal instructions while you are driving and a map for you to look at when you can safely do so.
Speed
Some forms of information allow people to control the speed with which they take in information. For example, when reading a text about something familiar, one can read quickly to get the gist of the information. Texts about unfamiliar topics require much slower reading for comprehension. Other media control the speed of the information, such as a video. One way to accommodate speed issues is to make the media available so that students can review it individually and stop it at critical points to find more information.
Here is an example of a video that most people would want to slow down (including some people in that very classroom)! Since the video is available online, students in this course can review the information the professor is presenting, which alleviates the speed issue. Look at the first couple of minutes of it unless you are fascinated by the subject. The point of this video here is to provide you with a brief experience with the speed of information.
This is a lecture on semiotics (which is the analysis of meaning-making; link is to the page in this wiki on semiotics). In fact, this workshop on media is based more or less equally on cognitive theory and semiotics, so the lecture is related to the ideas here.
Symbol and Icon
Images such as photographs and maps are iconic representations of information--there are points of correspondence between their features and the features they represent. For example, if a road turns left, there is a line representing the road that also turns left. One way and "No U Turn" signs are also iconic because they represent the actual physical path a car is supposed or not supposed to take. Icons, of course, are iconic--such as the figures on the bathroom doorway, the pictures of file folders on the computer, and the statues of saints in cathedrals. Icons communicate information without using language, which is a strength. They are visual, which is why on elevators you often find Braille next to each icon representing closing doors, ground floor, and so forth.
Language is a symbolic form of representation because it carries an extra level of abstraction. Onomatopoeia is as close to iconic as language gets, where the sound of the word represents the sound of the thing that is represented by the word (such as "hiss" representing the sound a snake makes). There is no reason for the connection of certain sounds (e.g., /kat/, /dog/, etc.) to certain concepts. This connection between sound and meaning happens through social agreement--from birth, people live in the world of language and pick up these arbitrary connections. In many situations this extra layer of abstraction on meaning making can provide a large cognitive load, which means people are less likely to comprehend simply because comprehension takes a lot more work. Try needing to go to the bathroom in a country that has a written system different from yours (e.g., going from the Roman alphabet in English to the iconic Chinese writing). If no one speaks your language, you might go into the wrong door. This is where icons are truly helpful!
Meaning-making Systems
For each sensory channel/means of expression there are several meaning-making systems.
Visual
Language (reading and writing)
Visual arts
Images
Diagrams
Printed music
American Sign Language (ASL)
Drama
Mathematical signs
Auditory
Language (speaking and listening)
Music
Signals
Drama
Tactile
Braille
Raised print icons
Kinesthetic
Dance
American Sign Language
Mime
There are some olefactory and taste-related systems (wine tasting comes to mind and its special language) but those are more a topic for idle imagination than consideration here.
All meaning-making systems, whether or not they are linguistic, are "conventional" in that they have certain ways of expressing things that all users of the system need to understand. In order to explore this, let's use the example of the visual arts. The ancient Egyptians, like so many other cultures, created three dimensional art:
But when it came time to represent three dimensions in a two-dimensional art form, they struggled:
It's not that the artists lacked talent--this drawing is very well done. In fact other cultures had the same issue, including Western European art:
It wasn't until the Renaissance when Western European artists began depicting three dimensions using the conventions of representing perspectives:
This picture creates an illusion of depth using lines that converge toward a vanishing point where you see the sky through the door at the far end of the building. Closer things are larger and far away things are smaller, but these sizes change based on where they are in relation to the diagonals that converge. For example, one can suppose that the columns are really all the same size in the actual building, but they are depicted in relation to the viewer, making two columns very big and other columns smaller. The floor can help you to see that convergence of more or less diagonal rather than parallel lines.
This painting is no more three-dimensional than either of the two above since it is painted on a flat canvas. It just has a different set of rules or system for representing things. In some ways, it is less accurate than the flat paintings because the lines on the floor would be parallel in the real building but in this case they are tilted enough to represent not what really is but what you would see if you stood there. Someone from outside the Western European culture might have to take a few moments to figure out what is going on with a 2-d thing and all these distorted lines. It would not seem a natural representation to them. A hypothetical alien from outer-space, who would have few or no human-type schemas, might not even recognize the fact that this object is a representation of other objects.
Most conventions are "invisible" or not perceived to the person using that meaning-making system, which is why this digression into the history of art is necessary. The idea here is to make conventions "visible," a job for which art is ideal.
When we recognize that there are conventions to meaning-making systems and that these conventions are schemas in our minds, then we understand that we need to think through the conventions of any media we choose and figure out whether the audience shares those schemas or not. If they don't share those schemas, then somehow those conventions need to be taught. If a person cannot read at all, there is no use giving him/her a text and counting on that as an effective purveyor of information. That person does not know the conventions of reading (letters have sounds, put the sounds together and you can hear words, there are spaces between words, etc.).
While all meaning-making systems are conventional in nature, they are all necessary because each one brings to the fore a different type of ideas. American Sign Language in relation to English is a lot more efficient at conveying spatial locations because an ASL user can place signs in different locations around his/her body to demonstrate how one thing is related to another without having to use additional words. Music can convey deep feelings that cannot be conveyed in language, as can dance. When choosing a meaning-making system to use, one can think about the strengths of each one and use two or more systems that complement each other.
In the next section, these principles are applied to specific genres of media.
Characteristics of Informational Genres
Go here to cut to the chase.
This is a table that summarizes the characteristics of informational genres along with "Add-ons" that can enhance the genre's ability to provide information.
Audio description of this table is available in mp3 format because the chart content won't be recognized by browsers that turn text to speech.
Visual explanation of symbols on chart (this information is included in the above audio file):
Technology for the Communication of Information
The following links each lead to wiki pages that discuss how genres can be used across artifacts and hardware (including technology/tools that do not involve any kind of electronics), software, and on the web.
There are sound educational and strategic reasons for employing non-electronic media such as to use paper and pencil to create graphs (to get understanding of what is happening), to explore actual artifacts such as the biology of streams (preferably by wading in a stream), to try out hand tools such as hammers and saws or acrylic paints and brushes, to run 500 yards to get the feeling of how long that is. There are strategic ways to use kinesthetic activity as a medium for learning information. Of course along with being an effective means of presenting information, kinesthetic activities have two desirable side-effects--they get the wiggles out and they also counterbalance at least to some degree all the media that promotes unhealthy eating habits and sedentary lifestyles. Students who create presentations should consider these options as well as digital options.
In the past, specialized software was expensive so most schools didn't have access to it. Now there are Open Source programs that can be downloaded and installed so that students can learn to use sophisticated media in a strategic way.
Sometimes downloading and installing software is not desirable because installation means changing the computer in ways people don't want it changed. For example, a student might get used to using an Open Source program at school and might want to download and install it at home to use. The problem is that the home computer may not have enough power for the program or students' parents may have reasons they don't want the program on the home computer. In this case there are web apps (software that runs on the web and is not installed on the computer) that can do many of the same things. These are more accessible to students outside the school settings and also when school computers cannot handle software.
Time Efficiency and Media
One strategic aspect of using media is to create informational experiences in a time-efficient manner. Before the advent of computers, if you wanted to make a recording of a story book to help students read, you had to record it on a cassette tape and if you lost that cassette you would have to start all over again. Now, particularly with web apps, it is possible to add sensory/meaning-making channels to media that make it more accessible but that are not time consuming to create. Each page will refer to time-saving ways of handling media creation.
Text to Speech
Table of Contents
Purpose
The purpose of this workshop is to provide teachers with the information and resources they need to help their students to "make strategic use of digital media and visual displays of data to express information and enhance understanding of presentations." (Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts)Portfolio
Try making some kind of useful-to-you presentation using some new-to-you tools/understandings. You could take old teaching materials and add to them to accommodate more learners or you could make a new way of presenting information. Presentations are not always situations where the presenter stands at the front of a group--when creating materials for e-learning, one has to think of how the information will be presented.Scaffolds
Look here (Getting Started) for strategies that will help you to try out new technology and programs.Workshop Structure
This workshop includes information about strategic use of media followed by tables that summarize specific uses and provide resources. Along with providing information about media use, this workshop also demonstrates various kinds of media designed to make information available to as many people as possible.Principles Behind the Strategic Use of Media
The purpose of using digital media is to enhance presentations through enriching the audience members' experiences with the information being presented. Strategic use of digital media means that presenters have thought through not just the ideas they want to share but also the ways in which they can share the ideas so that the audience will comprehend what they are presenting. This section considers how various forms of digital media work in terms of communicating ideas.Media and Cognitive Processing
We take information in through our senses and then this information gets sorted out by the brain and sent to the correct part of the brain for comprehension related to each sense.There are several factors that can influence how sensory information can get sorted and perceived:
Because of the potential perceptual and comprehension issues, presenters can maximize comprehension through using more than one sensory channel--such as auditory language but also images or actual artifacts that can be touched and experienced. Digital media, of course, opens up a great number of choices for presenting information across sensory channels.
Genres of Media and Their Characteristics
In literature there are many genres and each genre has a different purpose, a fact which we all know. It's difficult to write up a scientific experiment using poetry as the genre! The same is true with any kind of media. Each genre offers a different way of providing information and the selection of genre is a critical part of the strategic use of media. In the following section, each genre will be analyzed in relation to how it presents information.Random and Serial Access
Imagine trying to describe this piece of land. From this aerial view we can see many of its features--the river, fields, trees, and houses. We can see each element of the land and its relationship to the other elements, such as the river bend and the vegetation in that bend. We see all the features equally--the photographer has placed the river in the middle, suggesting that it is the main subject of the photo, but other things can be seen equally well.
If you were on the ground and you had to help someone else understand the features and elements of the land without benefit of a helicopter, how would you do it? Where would you go? What part should be described first? What part should be last? How would you use words to describe the relationship of the fields to the river? How would you describe the river bends and their locations? In other words, how could you help the person develop similar schemas to the person who flew over the land and took this picture?
The aerial view is "randomly accessible" information--your eyes can look anywhere in order to find information. The walk on the ground is "serially accessible" information--which means in order to understand the whole thing, you have to go through information that requires time and memory. Another example of this is the difference between Google maps and Google street view. In fact, internet mapping services such as Mapquest and Google maps offer information in both random and serial access formats. If you drive somewhere unfamiliar, you can print out the map or you can print out the step-by-step instructions. A GPS unit will offer verbal instructions while you are driving and a map for you to look at when you can safely do so.
Speed
Some forms of information allow people to control the speed with which they take in information. For example, when reading a text about something familiar, one can read quickly to get the gist of the information. Texts about unfamiliar topics require much slower reading for comprehension. Other media control the speed of the information, such as a video. One way to accommodate speed issues is to make the media available so that students can review it individually and stop it at critical points to find more information.Here is an example of a video that most people would want to slow down (including some people in that very classroom)! Since the video is available online, students in this course can review the information the professor is presenting, which alleviates the speed issue. Look at the first couple of minutes of it unless you are fascinated by the subject. The point of this video here is to provide you with a brief experience with the speed of information.
This is a lecture on semiotics (which is the analysis of meaning-making; link is to the page in this wiki on semiotics). In fact, this workshop on media is based more or less equally on cognitive theory and semiotics, so the lecture is related to the ideas here.
Symbol and Icon
Images such as photographs and maps are iconic representations of information--there are points of correspondence between their features and the features they represent. For example, if a road turns left, there is a line representing the road that also turns left. One way and "No U Turn" signs are also iconic because they represent the actual physical path a car is supposed or not supposed to take. Icons, of course, are iconic--such as the figures on the bathroom doorway, the pictures of file folders on the computer, and the statues of saints in cathedrals. Icons communicate information without using language, which is a strength. They are visual, which is why on elevators you often find Braille next to each icon representing closing doors, ground floor, and so forth.Language is a symbolic form of representation because it carries an extra level of abstraction. Onomatopoeia is as close to iconic as language gets, where the sound of the word represents the sound of the thing that is represented by the word (such as "hiss" representing the sound a snake makes). There is no reason for the connection of certain sounds (e.g., /kat/, /dog/, etc.) to certain concepts. This connection between sound and meaning happens through social agreement--from birth, people live in the world of language and pick up these arbitrary connections. In many situations this extra layer of abstraction on meaning making can provide a large cognitive load, which means people are less likely to comprehend simply because comprehension takes a lot more work. Try needing to go to the bathroom in a country that has a written system different from yours (e.g., going from the Roman alphabet in English to the iconic Chinese writing). If no one speaks your language, you might go into the wrong door. This is where icons are truly helpful!
Meaning-making Systems
For each sensory channel/means of expression there are several meaning-making systems.Visual arts
Images
Diagrams
Printed music
American Sign Language (ASL)
Drama
Mathematical signs
Music
Signals
Drama
Raised print icons
American Sign Language
Mime
There are some olefactory and taste-related systems (wine tasting comes to mind and its special language) but those are more a topic for idle imagination than consideration here.
All meaning-making systems, whether or not they are linguistic, are "conventional" in that they have certain ways of expressing things that all users of the system need to understand. In order to explore this, let's use the example of the visual arts. The ancient Egyptians, like so many other cultures, created three dimensional art:
But when it came time to represent three dimensions in a two-dimensional art form, they struggled:
It's not that the artists lacked talent--this drawing is very well done. In fact other cultures had the same issue, including Western European art:
It wasn't until the Renaissance when Western European artists began depicting three dimensions using the conventions of representing perspectives:
This picture creates an illusion of depth using lines that converge toward a vanishing point where you see the sky through the door at the far end of the building. Closer things are larger and far away things are smaller, but these sizes change based on where they are in relation to the diagonals that converge. For example, one can suppose that the columns are really all the same size in the actual building, but they are depicted in relation to the viewer, making two columns very big and other columns smaller. The floor can help you to see that convergence of more or less diagonal rather than parallel lines.
This painting is no more three-dimensional than either of the two above since it is painted on a flat canvas. It just has a different set of rules or system for representing things. In some ways, it is less accurate than the flat paintings because the lines on the floor would be parallel in the real building but in this case they are tilted enough to represent not what really is but what you would see if you stood there. Someone from outside the Western European culture might have to take a few moments to figure out what is going on with a 2-d thing and all these distorted lines. It would not seem a natural representation to them. A hypothetical alien from outer-space, who would have few or no human-type schemas, might not even recognize the fact that this object is a representation of other objects.
Most conventions are "invisible" or not perceived to the person using that meaning-making system, which is why this digression into the history of art is necessary. The idea here is to make conventions "visible," a job for which art is ideal.
When we recognize that there are conventions to meaning-making systems and that these conventions are schemas in our minds, then we understand that we need to think through the conventions of any media we choose and figure out whether the audience shares those schemas or not. If they don't share those schemas, then somehow those conventions need to be taught. If a person cannot read at all, there is no use giving him/her a text and counting on that as an effective purveyor of information. That person does not know the conventions of reading (letters have sounds, put the sounds together and you can hear words, there are spaces between words, etc.).
While all meaning-making systems are conventional in nature, they are all necessary because each one brings to the fore a different type of ideas. American Sign Language in relation to English is a lot more efficient at conveying spatial locations because an ASL user can place signs in different locations around his/her body to demonstrate how one thing is related to another without having to use additional words. Music can convey deep feelings that cannot be conveyed in language, as can dance. When choosing a meaning-making system to use, one can think about the strengths of each one and use two or more systems that complement each other.
In the next section, these principles are applied to specific genres of media.
Characteristics of Informational Genres
Go here to cut to the chase.
This is a table that summarizes the characteristics of informational genres along with "Add-ons" that can enhance the genre's ability to provide information.
Audio description of this table is available in mp3 format because the chart content won't be recognized by browsers that turn text to speech.
Visual explanation of symbols on chart (this information is included in the above audio file):
Technology for the Communication of Information
The following links each lead to wiki pages that discuss how genres can be used across artifacts and hardware (including technology/tools that do not involve any kind of electronics), software, and on the web.
There are sound educational and strategic reasons for employing non-electronic media such as to use paper and pencil to create graphs (to get understanding of what is happening), to explore actual artifacts such as the biology of streams (preferably by wading in a stream), to try out hand tools such as hammers and saws or acrylic paints and brushes, to run 500 yards to get the feeling of how long that is. There are strategic ways to use kinesthetic activity as a medium for learning information. Of course along with being an effective means of presenting information, kinesthetic activities have two desirable side-effects--they get the wiggles out and they also counterbalance at least to some degree all the media that promotes unhealthy eating habits and sedentary lifestyles. Students who create presentations should consider these options as well as digital options.
In the past, specialized software was expensive so most schools didn't have access to it. Now there are Open Source programs that can be downloaded and installed so that students can learn to use sophisticated media in a strategic way.
Sometimes downloading and installing software is not desirable because installation means changing the computer in ways people don't want it changed. For example, a student might get used to using an Open Source program at school and might want to download and install it at home to use. The problem is that the home computer may not have enough power for the program or students' parents may have reasons they don't want the program on the home computer. In this case there are web apps (software that runs on the web and is not installed on the computer) that can do many of the same things. These are more accessible to students outside the school settings and also when school computers cannot handle software.
Time Efficiency and Media
One strategic aspect of using media is to create informational experiences in a time-efficient manner. Before the advent of computers, if you wanted to make a recording of a story book to help students read, you had to record it on a cassette tape and if you lost that cassette you would have to start all over again. Now, particularly with web apps, it is possible to add sensory/meaning-making channels to media that make it more accessible but that are not time consuming to create. Each page will refer to time-saving ways of handling media creation.Photo
Diagram
Graph
Video
Slide show
Lecture
Audio file
Text
Artifact
Book with no words
Song
Music (no words)
Braille
Text to speech
Map
Movement for learning
ASL